“It’s going to take forever to get there in this snow.”
That was the first remark I heard about the event, aside from the basics: place, fire type, and potential casualty estimate.
For those interested, the answers were “Silver Stream Forest off RR7, unknown, and unknown.”
We were in the middle of a once-in-a-century snowstorm. Those once-in-a-century storms that seem to come every five years nowadays. Doesn’t mean much to some, but for those of us who have to work and drive in them to save lives, it matters.
That night, it mattered.
Our station is the only one in the area. Under ideal conditions, the rural route seven connection to the forest would be a 35 minute drive. We’d be lucky to get there in 90.
An hour into the drive, we saw the aurorae, despite the howling wind blowing heaps of snow through the air. I’d guess the visibility was less than ten feet. But the aurorae were clear.
“Electrical?” John posited.
“Not sure how that’d work,” someone answered — sounded like Lloyd.
“No.” John agreed. “Me neither.”
I looked out the side window toward the direction of the lightshow. It wasn’t like the kind I’d seen when I spent time in Iceland after college. Nothing like that. These ribbons of light were thin and fast moving. And red, too. All shades of red, from deep crimson to something that neared orange.
“Definitely not the borealis,” I said, mostly to myself.
“Where do you want to go?” he whispers. A tongue, short and pink, slips out and hangs over a swollen lower lip. Eel slick. A leafy gutter after a late October rainstorm. Far, far away, a crowded planet annihilates into its sun.
“To meet them,” she replies, and reaches with a tentative hand.
The door widens to accommodate. Skin splits, then knits. New teeth sprout from elongating gums. Enamel amaryllises.
Hand, wrist, forearm. The door makes room. It did for me. I was the first to try. The first to succeed.
“How far until…” she asks, only to hush. Right then, she can feel it. I can tell.
Five fingers finesse frigid, fleshy folds. Folds finesse back.
Eric shot himself in the head on April 24th, 2016. I was standing beside him. I still have the bloodstained clothes. And the bloodstained memories.
“You need to understand, Elena,” he explained, holding the gun to his temple. “There’s a bridge. It’s right here.”
He shook the gun, as if to signify its new status – not as a weapon, but as a means of traversal.
“Don’t, Eric.” My voice was slow and calm but flickers of panic were doubtless present in its timbre.
“I see it now. In flashes. Whenever I imagine pulling the trigger, I get a glimpse of the bridge ahead. It’s not black. It’s not empty. It’s bright and full and warm with everything I’d imagined.”
Machinery whirred around us. An omnipresent hum of energy filled the room as countless megajoules of electricity filled capacitating cylinders, all ready to discharge at a specific time.
“What if you’re wrong?” I asked. “What then? You’re just dead. And you’re worthless when you’re dead. All that potential is gone.”
“The continuation of life affirms worthlessness. My worth is in what I’ve seen. My worth is in what happens next. Because if I’m right, and I know I’m right, everyone will learn that what we are in right now is just the first stage. Once that gets out, we can all go through. And on.”
“But by that, you mean that everyone can just die? Are you listening to yourself?”
“The Secret Doctors of NASA” is a series of memoirs, diaries, and reports from actual doctors employed by an undisclosed arm of NASA between 1970 and 2001. These writings contain true accounts of the unusual and often highly-classified medical conditions experienced by astronauts during and after their space missions. Following the defunding of the clandestine medical program after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the majority of these accounts were left, forgotten, on tape drives in a NASA storage facility. In 2016, a former intern, whose job was to clean out one of these facilities, discovered them. Two years later, he is ready to release what he found.
Releaser’s note: This account is from a post-surgery oral memoir dictated by an unnamed surgeon to an anonymous NASA official. The background circumstances are unknown.
A Surgeon’s Nightmare
Look, I’d been awake for two straight days. You guys have been putting us through hell with all the injuries from the Hephaestus Project, so forgive me if my results weren’t as great as they could have been. But come the hell on – what do you expect when someone comes to me in that condition?
So you want to know what happened in my own words? Fine. But don’t get pissed when I call your practices into question.
The patient was admitted with significant injuries to his legs, torso, arms, and head. On the surface, they appeared to be lacerations, which was strange because their severity would have caused near-instantaneous exsanguination and they would’ve gone straight to the morgue, not to me. Closer inspection revealed the wounds had been sealed by intense cold, as if the patient had been frozen either while being injured or immediately after. He was still clinging to life.
“The Secret Doctors of NASA” is a series of memoirs, diaries, and reports from actual doctors employed by an undisclosed arm of NASA between 1970 and 2001. These writings contain true accounts of the unusual and often highly-classified medical conditions experienced by astronauts during and after their space missions. Following the defunding of the clandestine medical program after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the majority of these accounts were left, forgotten, on tape drives in a NASA storage facility. In 2016, a former intern, whose job was to clean out one of these facilities, discovered them. Two years later, he is ready to release what he found.
A Dentist’s Discovery
Arnold F. A*******, DDS
August 4th, 1989
I met the astronaut after a half-year mission on the Russian space station. He’d gone through his preliminary post-landing physical but complained about pain in his jaw and gums. His health, aside from those complaints, was fair.
It was my job to find out what was wrong with him before moving him on to the next specialist. The urologist, I think. The order always changes.
True knowledge requires self destruction. I’d always preached it, but I’d never practiced it. Never, until this morning, when the red wire slipped into the black module and I moved while going nowhere. My consciousness – my essence – erupted from my body and left me standing in that busy room of machines and batteries and magic.
(Magic is nothing without machines and batteries.)
I left my body without looking back. The air was smoky and shimmering. The walls were porous. No sound met my earless nothingness. There was only sight. My third eye; my soul; my angel: my guide. My everything.
I’m an administrator at a major hospital in the New York City area. I’m not supposed to talk about this, but it’s so disconcerting that I believe more people need to know about it. There’s been an unexpected and inexplicable rise in the stockpile of blood. It’s not only at our hospital, but in hospitals and blood banks all over the world.
No one knows where it’s coming from and no one can seem to explain how it gets there. All the routine tests say it’s perfectly good and free from any pathogens and impurities. But the fact remains: no one knows what’s going on.
You have to realize – hospitals and blood banks everywhere have always been low on blood. It’s why there are blood drives and calls for donations and all that. The last few weeks, though, there’s been so much that our hospital needed dispose of some because it expired before we had a chance to use it. As weird as this sounds, it gets worse.
This is the part I’m worried will come back and bite me in the ass if any of the other administrators discover who I am. I signed a NDA explicitly stating I wouldn’t talk about this. Still, I can’t keep this quiet. When we dispose of blood, we do it in the incinerator with all the other medical waste. The fire burns so hot, pretty much everything evaporates and all that’s left is inert ash. But this blood didn’t evaporate. It did something way different.
A hospital maintenance worker was on the roof doing some unrelated work when smoke from the incinerator began exiting through the chimney. It looked normal for a while, but then the smoke tapered off and flies started pouring out. He told us they flew straight up for nearly two full minutes and hung above the roof like a cloud. After another minute, they fell like rain and burst open, covering the roof and the maintenance worker with the same blood we’d tried to incinerate. We tried to incinerate more blood, this time with hospital administrators waiting on the roof. Same result.
Our administrators have spoken with the heads of other hospitals around the country. They’ve experienced similar issues. The blood banks are bursting with overstock and people everywhere are being given this blood that just appeared out of nowhere.
The last thing I’m going to mention is the patient we re-admitted last night. He’d been discharged a month ago following an operation which required multiple transfusions. Those transfusions were done with the mystery blood before anyone noticed its existence. His re-admission was due to a fire at his home. He came into the ER with 60% of his body covered in 3rd degree burns. While he was being worked on, flies erupted from underneath the burned flesh and dropped to the floor, exploding into thick droplets of blood.
The patient died soon after. The doctors and nurses were frightened and confused, but they don’t know the whole story. But I guess they will soon. Please help me tell more people about what’s going on. The blood just doesn’t stop coming.
